London, Day 1, June 17, 2007

De. and I arrived this afternoon after a very smooth, uneventful flight. We are here! Though it was a little strenuous, I nonetheless enjoyed traveling to the dorm from Heathrow via underground (or tube). By the time we made it to the dorm I felt very much at home.

My favorite thing in the underground was at one point while transfering from one line to another when we came upon a row of vending machines, and one of them sold NOVELS!!!



I thought this was the best thing ever. I love the idea of putting in my money, punching in the code and getting a novel to consume while I travel the underground.

Because of construction on the underground, we were allowed to travel for free on the Heathrow Express straight to Paddington Station, from where we continued on the regular underground. Here is Paddington Station:


And here is a photo of De, my dear friend who has been in Library school with me since the beginning:

















Here is a photo of our dorm: it is at Astor College, on Charlotte Street.

Now that we have arrived safely and are securely ensconced in our respective dorm rooms, unpacked, napped and well fed, we have finally gotten around to talking about why we are here. Classes begin tomorrow morning, and we are both excited and curious as to what it's going to be like.

I consider this blog to perform various functions.

1. It allows me to keep a simple journal, much like a diary/scrapbook, in which I can record the more mundane aspects of my trip, for the simple sake of sharing the experience with friends and family, with photos, thoughts on food, impressions on people, weather, and the much anticipated reunion with my dear friends, A, D and I;

2. It acts as a repository for resources and sources to be used for my bibliographic essay, the second part of my assignment for this class, where I can upload links to websites and articles to be perused at leisure when I am ready to write my short essay;

3. It acts as a repository for a summary of my impressions of each lecture, on a daily basis, with notes, quotes, links, profiles of the various speakers, chronicles of our day trips to Oxford, Cambridge and the various publishing houses;

and 4. It acts, perhaps most importantly, as a repository for my thoughts and those of my closest friends on this trip about the themes of the class as a whole. These thoughts will be the main source of inspiration for the last part of the assignment, a 15-page paper complete with interviews, photos, impressions, notes, reflections on what I learned from the bibliographic essay, and so forth. All of this after choosing a theme to study in depth at the beginning of the course.

So from now on there will be various "columns" in this blog, dedicated to these different functions.

Thoughts

De and I had dinner in an Indian restaurant on our first night (in London one must eat curry as often as possible, is my feeling). Here we were finally able to relax and start talking.

One thing I have been meditating on for some time now is this: what changes in the perception of the reader when reading text online as opposed to on paper. If there is a write I admire and respect, do I respond differently to reading a text of his in a book or in a journal as opposed to reading his writing online in a blog, for instance, or even an article in an online journal? Is the idea of "authority" corrupted, or corroded in any way by the absence of a physical paper object? I think the answer to this question is yes, at least for those of us who belong to the paper generation, the "gen-p"-ers, if you will. My children will probably say that it makes no difference to them where they read something, though the concept of authority is still quite foreign to them. I wonder if the entire concept of authority will survive the transition from analog to digital...

De brought up the question of general theme of the class. We have both noticed that the lectures and on-site visits we will be making are all focused quite heavily on the publishing angle, as in the perspective of the large and long established publishing houses like Macmillan, for instance. De is very much tuned in to the technological innovations with which our field is rife at this crucial moment in history, and she is very interested, from a librarian's point of view, in "getting information out there". Over dinner we were wondering whether the creative commons aspect of publishing scholarly journals and articles will be much discussed during our classes. De was telling me a very interesting story about editors of scholarly publications that have apparently been abandoning their jobs in droves so they could open their own journals, publish them only online and make the contents available much more widely and at a much lower cost. All this is very interesting, and I hope we do find out more about this particular topic.

I suggested that because this is the first combined summer program between Pratt SILS and UCL SLAIS, we will be experiencing the "maiden voyage" of the program. This has some very positive sides to it, the most important of which being the enthusiasm of all participants for what we all consider to be an exciting new venture. On the "negative" side, if we want to call it that, there is the fact that there will probably be some kinks that will need ironing out. Though it does seem that the lectures all seem to be skewed to the sole perspective of the publishers, I think this may be due not to a wish to censor, but rather a desire to create a perimeter in which to manage the class, in order to avoid getting lost in a sea of uncontrolled flow of information.

We shall find out tomorrow morning.

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As for dinner, my favorite dish was okra cooked in tomato sauce that had been reduced so long it was almost black. Every bite was an intimation of heaven.

Love to all my friends and family, see you all tomorrow!